Roberta Gilchrist

Roberta Gilchrist is one of the doyennes of the monastic archaeology of medieval Britain, and in this volume she draws on her many decades of scholarship to explore how such sites have contributed to local identities and senses of place over several centuries, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between faith, heritage, interpretation, and concepts of value and authenticity. A really valuable read for anyone who works on medieval religious history, landscape studies, or heritage studies, with some useful insights and also the occasional eyebrow-raising anecdote (did you know that when the medieval Cistercian abbey of Villers in Belgium was excavated in 1938, the work was guided by psychics who claimed to be able to divine the former locations of buildings based on the detection of "radiation"? Delightful lunacy!). Gilchrist is perhaps more accommodating than I would be about some of the more "woo" interpretations of medieval sites, Glastonbury in particular, but she has produced a very useful study.… (más)

Roberta Gilchrist's goal is to promote a new form of archaeological analysis, one which takes the "life course" as its interpretive lens. In other words, she examines the life cycle(s) of medieval people—encompassing both the periods before birth and after death—in terms of material culture. For instance, in skeletal remains, Gilchrist identifies the hip, knee, and spinal problems that plagued peasant women who spent their time carrying heavy loads and squatting next to cooking fires; in shoes and clothing, she sees some of the ways in which medieval people constructed class and gender; and in ritual deposits, she argues for the evidence of the living's anxieties about the dead. Medieval Life looks at evidence from across Western Europe, but its primary focus is England between about the eleventh and mid-sixteenth centuries.

I'm not sure that there is much distinctly new about Gilchrist's analysis as a whole, beyond her framing of it as happening within the "life course" framework and her discussion of "biographical objects", something I'll have to think about more in relation to my own work. However, Gilchrist does a good job of synthesising a large interdisciplinary corpus of recent scholarship, and people working on many different aspects of the medieval world will find a trawl through her bibliography to be a rewarding one.… (más)

Gender and Material Culture sets out to analyse the archaeological evidence of female religious, primarily in later medieval England, using a gender framework. Gilchrist uses spatial analysis of the geographical and topographical locations of women's nunneries, of their layout and architecture, and of surviving fragments of their material culture, to conclude that the religious experience of these women was very different from men—not, as traditional scholarship would have it, because these were failed or lesser versions of male monasteries, but rather institutions established to fulfil a different social function.

This is a solid work; the highlight for me was the first chapter, which outlines the development of gender theory in archaeology since the 1980s in astonishingly lucid prose (anything that can make Bourdieu clearer to me is deserving of the accolade 'astonishing'). There are some weaknesses, however. Structurally, it betrays its origins as a doctoral dissertation, and could have used some rearranging and judicious editing. For a book about women, the women themselves do not feature strongly—perhaps because there is so little detail on the activities which they performed. Apart from one brief and intriguing mention of nuns having possibly worked in the fields at harvest time in the fourteenth century, these women recede into the background. At times, too, Gilchrist seems to slip into using the male/female gender binary which she so adamantly rejects in her introduction. Still, this is a good demonstration of the fact that a gendered analysis of material culture is possible and highly informative.… (más)